A Glimpse of the Glory of God: On the wall opposite me as I write is a picture I saved from obscurity. Unlike the famous painting by Carravaccio which hung unrecognized on the wall of our Jesuit community dining room for many years, this painting has little or no monetary value.
The diminutive figure of a man dressed in a simple green robe stands on a height. His hair is white as is
his jutting beard, and his head is thrown back as his eyes stare trying to take in the immensity of a star-filled sky. You would think he never saw the stars before. And indeed he may never have looked at them like this before. He is Abraham and he is checking up on God.
God had spoken to him. And although Abraham and his wife Sarah were elderly, God told him they would have a son. You would think God knew that it was what they wanted most in the whole world. It seemed to be pushing it a bit far to add that his descendents would be as numerous as the stars of the heavens. So in the picture he is standing dead still wondering if he could begin to believe the word God had spoken to him. Abraham was our father in faith, and he trusted. Later in the bible, that promise is fulfilled when his descendents in Egypt became so numerous that the Pharaoh fearing them enslaved them.
I was thinking about Abraham and his trust in God when I attended recently a talk on astronomy. At the end, a picture was flashed on the screen of the planet Saturn, the second largest of the planets. It was taken during a recent probe sent to that distant place and it showed the great planet with the sun behind it, and its rings of orbiting satellites shining in the reflected light. On the periphery of the screen were specks of what I thought were dust, but which, I was amazed to discover, were other planets, and one of them was planet earth. Our earth that we think of as so big and important was such a small part of the universe! If Abraham was prepared to trust God on the evidence of the stars he could see, how could I not trust the Maker of the Universe, a universe suddenly revealed to me as infinitely greater and more complex than I or Abraham could ever have imagined? And God could have time to care for and love the tiny things on that speck of dust-like planet, called earth. Through Jesus he called us friends and promised to be with us always. He really says to us, ‘you are precious in my sight’.
John Looby, S.J.
Editor